An-My Lê says she still remembers seeing her parents lay sand bags around the walls of her bedroom in Vietnam during the 1960s to protect against mortar blasts from the surrounding war.

“Every night there were attacks,” she says.

Today, Lê is a successful photographer and professor at Bard College but the issue of war is still central to her life. It’s become the focus of her photography and this week she was honored as one of 23 recipients of the $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship.

“I was thrilled and stunned,” she says.

For the last 15 year Lê has used her camera and her experience to dig into the complexities of an issue that’s often seen in very stark terms. She’s become well known for the unique way she addresses the scale of war and for her focus on military landscapes.

“I hope that the work transcends my personal experience, but it definitely colors it,” she says.

Her two most famous works include Small Wars, which follows Vietnam re-enactors in the forests of Virginia and 29 Palms, which looks at American soldiers training in the Southern California desert before being deployed to the war in Iraq.

In Small Wars Lê says she found a way to dig into America’s ongoing fascination with Vietnam but also used it as a way to explore her own relationship with war, and make sense of it. The project was also the first place Lê, who considers herself a landscape photographer, saw landscape become a window for her to explore combat. In a way it’s a nod back to the original Vietnam War, where she says geography was a constant theme.

“The idea of terrain was something that always came up when I talked to Vietnam vets,” she says. “Landscape was important to strategy and I wanted to explore that.”

It’s an approach she would carry through to 29 Palms, which also focuses heavily on the terrain in which combat exercises take place. Lê says that by taking a broader approach she hopes to put military operations in context.

“When you step back the tanks look like toy soldiers because they are surrounded by the environment which is a force that is still much greater than us,” she says.

When talking about her work Lê says she thinks war should be prevented at all costs. She does not, however, think war can simply be labeled as something “bad.”

“Look at the second World War,” she says. “And if you read literature we talk about civilization being built with the help of war.”

For her, war meant hardship and danger but it also meant opportunity because it allowed her family to immigrate to the U.S. and it allowed her to develop into the artist she is today.

Overall she says she’s trying to create perspective instead of a definitive statement.

“I guess you could call me fatalistic because I believe it was my destiny to be born in a country of war,” she says. “I always try to look at the positive effects [of war] as well.”

Most recently Lê has been documenting various military groups engaged in non-combat activities including war exercises and humanitarian missions. In addition to shooting landscapes she’s also decided to focus in and has been creating more portraits.

It’s a way for her to continue looking at the gray areas of war and one more step toward complicating the story.

“I like things that are open-ended,” she says. “My pictures are often just the beginning of the conversation.”